Not In My Back Yard
by Rainstorm Amaya Arianrhod
Summary: It's not only Adam who moulds Lower Tadfield to his specifications. It's just that Pepper is a little more... specialised.


**A/N: **This fic was hell to write in an interesting sort of way (I like Pepper! It's just that she doesn't seem to like me very much) and is based off an old prompt I gave Gogol. **_Please read and review!_**

**Disclaimer: **I do not own Good Omens, nor am I associated with Neil Gaiman/Sir Terry Pratchett, and do not seek legal ownership/any profit. I'm just playing in somebody else's sandbox, and I promise to put them back when I'm done!

* * *

It's as if it sprung up overnight. It didn't, of course; it's not that new. It must have been set up while she was away at university.

It takes Pepper a moment to realise that she's standing a bit closer to the window of what used to be a grocer's than is exactly normal. It takes her a lot longer to realise that her hands are curled into fists, bitten nails chewing into her palm, and that they don't want to relax. Her hands always clench when she's angry, but normally she can unclench them, return them to lax normality.

She glares at the images printed onto the glass: men and women in uniform, superimposed on a Union Jack, and exerts her willpower. It doesn't work. Her hands stay tightly clenched, ready to fight – it's almost like another part of her brain is making them stay like that, and Pepper doesn't appreciate it in the slightest.

Pepper ups the glare from venomous to murderous, and has the pleasure of seeing the man in the used-to-be-a-grocer's take one small, involuntary step back, which soothes her a little and allows her to put her hands' disobedience down to the cold. Lower Tadfield is always bitterly cold in the winter, frosty and Christmas-card perfect with a respectable layer of snow, and now she thinks about it, she'd like to warm up a little, and the used-to-be-a-grocer's is probably quite warm inside. Also, going in will give her the chance to ask the man in uniform exactly what the army thinks it's _doing_, putting a recruiting station in _her town_.

So Pepper tugs her wilfully clashing maroon beanie further down over her head, obscuring most of a fine head of red hair sharply cut and styled by Janine who owes her a favour, stuffs her gloved fists into her pockets and opens the door into the used-to-be-a-grocer's, which she refuses to think of in any other way. To be fair, she does so with her foot. And her foot may, or may not, be encased in a boot from the army surplus store just down the road from the university halls. Still, that's no reason for the man inside to look so alarmed. She's just being practical; her hands won't unclench to push the door open, and they'll warm up quicker in her pockets than they will grasping handles. And she didn't kick the door very hard, after all.

The look on his face gives Pepper a kind of dark satisfaction, and sends a rush of electricity through her veins, warming her (but her hands stay wrapped in fists: if anything, they curl tighter.) He's _afraid_ of her, she thinks, picking up on the tiniest tics, the feet spread for balance, the tense posture, _afraid_, she thinks gleefully, and she's really, _really_ happy all of a sudden. She's also grinning, if that's what you call it when all your teeth are exposed.

"Can I help you?" the man says warily. He's got a Yorkshire accent. Pepper doesn't hold it against him, even though her conscious mind is busy fighting a war with the other part of her, the one she doesn't recognise, doesn't acknowledge and nearly always doesn't know is there. This part of her has her fists shuddering with the need to hit, and is revelling in this place of- of leaflets, and posters, and forms, and pep-talks, not because of what it is but because of what it leads to. And because this part of her is enjoying itself so much here, Pepper – the real Pepper, not this purely instinctive atavistic creature Pepper – wants the place it likes so much gone, so that she can put the creature away and use her hands for something other than hurting.

"Yes," Pepper says. "When did you come here?"

"October," the man says, unwillingly. "Why d'you ask?"

"No reason," Pepper says, and looks him up and down, and lets the creature speak for her, filtered through her. "I think you should go."

"_What_?"

"You don't belong here," Pepper says, and her fists itch with the knowledge that she could destroy this place in moments. "I bet you get hardly any recruits."

The man is a funny pasty colour now, and silent. He looks at her like his worst nightmare, like he isn't seeing her, but something else, something ripe with blood and wrapped in other people's entrails.

"You should go," Pepper repeats conversationally, and the man staggers back as if she hit him.

Maybe she did.

She turns on her heel and goes out. Her hands are still wrapped in fists, but it doesn't matter. For some reason, the door is hanging on its hinges, wooden frame split half to splinters. The glass has one or two small round holes in it, ripples of fractures spreading out from them.

Funny. It wasn't like that when she went in.

* * *

On Christmas Eve Pepper walks down the high street with Adam. She is wearing a dark blue hoodie and the same maroon beanie, and she has her arm linked with Adam's, because she does. Snow is falling again, a light flurry that stings her face and soaks her hoodie.

Adam stops outside the used-to-be-a-grocer's. The images are still on the window, but the broken door has been taken off and replaced with a steel shutter. The front room inside is empty, and there's a For Sale sign on the wall above it. "Used to be a recruiting station there," he says, in his idle, casual way.

"Really?" Pepper says, and meets his eye without flinching. "I thought it used to be a grocer."


End file.
